A mom started handing out fentanyl test strips to high school kids. In the absence of an official community meeting, a Boulder woman who works in addiction called her own. Parents and community leaders who knew the boys tried to send up a flare then. Why is it so hard for law officers to trace back to the source of fentanyl and make a homicide case after someone dies from it? > STORY
> DAY 3: Parents whose children have died from fentanyl poisoning say they feel like their kids were murdered. > DAY 2: The lack of an official coordinated effort to warn the community that people were dying from fentanyl has frustrated parents and community activists, who have taken on the task themselves. The records - and the struggle to obtain them - revealed not only a pervasive fentanyl problem but bureaucratic delays in releasing public information that have left the community struggling to sound the alarm that its young people are dying. > STORY > DAY 1: The Colorado Sun spent months and more than $400 gathering autopsy reports in order to learn the scope of the damage caused by fentanyl in Boulder County. Near his body, investigators found a baggie of the now familiar, white, bar-shaped pills. Less than 60 hours after Jack was found dead, another 18-year-old Boulder County man died of an overdose while sitting on the couch. The autopsy records - and the struggle to obtain them - revealed not only a pervasive and seemingly inexorable fentanyl problem in Boulder County but delays in releasing public information so lengthy that the community has struggled to sound the alarm that its young people are dying. The Sun spent more than $400 on multiple public records requests to the Boulder County Coroner’s Office in order to learn the scope of the damage caused in one Colorado county by fentanyl, which overtook heroin and methamphetamine in the last few years as the drug causing the most overdose deaths in Colorado. (Provided by Patricia Swanson)Īll of them - a dozen people ranging in age from 18 to 68, according to records released so far to The Colorado Sun - were killed by fentanyl, either on its own or in combination with other drugs. Jack Swanson, middle, with his mom and sister during a vacation to Costa Rica. If I can help his friends or any kids in Boulder or around the world, I will do it.” So for me, I will not put it in a bottle. “That day, many people said, ‘Don’t say he died this way because you have a business.’ I think that’s ignorant. “Why should I hide something? I never hide my struggles or my weaknesses,” she told The Colorado Sun. In his obituary, Swanson’s parents wrote that he “was abusing drugs and fell asleep only to never wake up again.” There was no running from it, no keeping their teenager’s cause of death a secret as some had suggested to his mother, Patricia Swanson, warning her that his drug overdose could taint the reputation of her Boulder bilingual daycare center. Two in five of the counterfeit pills circulating the country, drugs made in Mexico to look like oxycodone and Xanax tablets, contain enough fentanyl to kill a person instantly.
Next to him were little blue pills and rectangular-shaped white ones, the kind sold in his hometown of Boulder and throughout Colorado as “mexis” and “xanny bars.” Jack Swanson, 18, died in February while listening to music in his bed.